


We Could Pretend (But That Never Suited Us)

by SoloMoon



Series: The Persistence of Memory [3]
Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: Aftermath of yeerk infestation, Canon Compliant, Gen, Implied/Referenced Body Horror, POV Minor Character, brief mention of sexual harassment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-05
Updated: 2020-05-05
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:41:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24023020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SoloMoon/pseuds/SoloMoon
Summary: Hedrick Chapman didn't ask to be taken hostage by the Animorphs, and then abandoned in the hork-bajir valley during the final battle.  But here he is, newly uninfested and confronted with the proof of past mistakes.
Series: The Persistence of Memory [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1448638
Comments: 11
Kudos: 100





	We Could Pretend (But That Never Suited Us)

**Author's Note:**

> It's always bugged me that the last we ever hear from Chapman, he's still being used as a hostage by Jake et al. to force the chee to help the Animorphs with their final battle plan. This is my own wrap-up for the character.
> 
> Title comes from the [Heather Dale song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqoTVDJa8J8).

Iniss 226 dies.

It’s been forty-one and a half hours since Chapman was kidnapped by the Animorphs. Seventy-two since the yeerk last fed. They needed a hostage, and he was their choice. Lucky him. They didn’t exactly have a kandrona generator in the hork-bajir valley. Unlucky Iniss.

Forty-one and a half hours, Chapman knows, because Michelle’s been sitting across from him counting on her watch. Waiting for the inevitable.

Now she jumps to her feet — she must see the dead yeerk sliding down his cheek. “Peter?” she calls out the door. “Naomi? Anyone! Need some help!”

She doesn’t go looking for them. Instead she lunges forward to lift Iniss 226’s body off Chapman’s earlobe. She carries the yeerk to a basin of water near the cabin door.

A laugh chokes itself in the back of Chapman’s throat. It’s a little late for that.

Luckily, it’s Eva who comes. She confirms the yeerk’s death with a single glance, then moves to its abandoned host. With brisk motions she uses a combat knife to saw through the ropes tying him to the cabin’s central support post.

Bless Eva, honestly. She knows to catch Chapman before he can tip over. Lowers him gently to the ground. Doesn’t expect him to do or say anything just yet.

Chapman flops onto his stomach, struggling with even the act of bracing a hand against the ground long enough to turn onto his side. Michelle starts babbling medical jargon: stroke, seizure, atrophy, aneurysm…

Ignoring her, Eva crouches next to him. “Don’t rush it,” she says. “Important thing is you’re out. You’re free. It’ll all come back, in time.”

He isn’t sure about _all_ , judging by Eva’s flat expression and clumsy stance.

Still, she’d know. She was a controller even longer than he was — doubtless she forgot as well, how to move a body that wasn’t hers for so very long. So he doesn’t rush. Carefully, he pushes himself upright. He sits up in stages, back propped against the cabin wall.

“Here.” Michelle kneels next to him, holding out an open water bottle.

Chapman looks at her, and then at Eva, silently imploring.

“Sorry, we don’t exactly have any plastic straws in this joint,” Eva says. “Give him a little space, Michelle. He’s fine.”

“Sant—” Chapman stops, works his lips, tries again. “Thank. Thank you.”

Eva steadies him again, without concern, without impatience, when he takes several minutes to climb to his feet and walk to the door of the cabin. He grips the door frame for support.

The sunlight outside is a shock. In some ways, the scene that resolves itself beyond the glare is even more so.

It’s all bizarrely close to being idyllic. A dozen yards down, Naomi is teaching what looks like an elementary-level reading class to a group that includes half a dozen hork-bajir and her own youngest daughter. Closer, but off to the left, a young woman with dark hair and white eyes that Chapman doesn’t know (too old for high school, too young for parent-teacher conferences) is assisting Peter in taking apart some kind of water refinery in search of leaks. When he turns the other way, Chapman finds Walter leaning against the wall of the next cabin over, deep in conversation with—

“ _Loren_?” Chapman says, taken aback. He heard she was killed, a while back.

She looks over at him. Takes a few steps closer to see him better. She’s older, face scarred and hair grey as well as blonde, but it’s unmistakably her. “I’m sorry,” she says with icy politesse. “Have we met?”

“Yeah,” Chapman mumbles, “I probably deserve that.”

Loren looks ready to say something else, but Walter pulls her back to whatever it was they were talking about.

Chapman wobbles his first few steps, but he gets momentum. Some combination of inertia and the tentative hope that he’s getting the hang of this keep him moving for several more yards. 

The far end of the valley is half a mile north of here. It’s the way they brought him in. His house, what little is left of it, should be another fifteen miles or so south-southwest of that point. He can start by regrouping there, and then…

He keeps walking. _And then_ he doesn’t know what. The best thing he’s got in the general direction of a plan is using the yeerk comm they issued Iniss 226. He’ll get Iniss 455 on the line for a location report—

Eva grabs him by the arm. “I’m sorry,” she says, breathing hard. “But I can’t let you do that.”

Chapman wrenches loose so hard that Eva stumbles. He feels a little bad — she’s a lot smaller than him — but he doesn’t stop.

Walter becomes the next person to step into his path. “Hey, man, I know this is hard, but we really can’t let you leave —”

Chapman clumsily shoves him aside too. Naomi stands in his way. She’s flanked by two hork-bajir. Both are young but sharp-bladed. They look more than happy to do what’s necessary to defend her.

“Friend Tobias said ‘stay.’ Stay and be safe,” one of the hork-bajir says.

“Mostly he said that because if you try to leave, you’ll be giving our position away and dooming us all.” Peter steps up next to Eva, still holding a pipe wrench in one hand.

“You don’t —” Chapman spins to look at them all, almost falling before he regains balance. “You don’t understand. The yeerks are annihilating the city. My daughter’s out there. She could be anywhere. I have to get her out of there, before…”

They’re all watching him in solemn silence. He swings from where Michelle stands hugging herself, to where Eva and Peter huddle close to each other. To Loren, watching him with unforgiving patience. To Naomi, resting a hand on her youngest daughter’s shoulder. To Walter, half-curled with silent pain.

“And where,” Michelle says, “do you think _our_ children are right now?”

* * *

He stays. They don’t exactly give him a choice. He doesn’t leave their perimeter, but he does traverse the side of the canyon late that night.

It’s arduous, annoying, when he’s still relearning how this body moves, but he makes the effort all the same. He can see her sitting at the top of the hill, silhouetted against the faint light of the unnatural stars created by yeerk craft in the distance. Her spine is still straight, her hair still long. These days she wears it back in a braid rather than loose around her shoulders.

Loren doesn’t glance around at the sound of his approach. Doesn’t look over even when he sits next to her. She continues staring out at the night, one hand on the dracon beam resting atop her knee.

Chapman clears his throat. Remembers, involuntarily, that their last real conversation ended with her kneeing him in the groin. “So it occurred to me,” he says. “That ‘I’m sorry’ is a woefully insufficient thing to say, under the circumstances. But the only thing worse than saying it would be not apologizing at all, so…” He shrugs.

This actually does get Loren to look over at him, frowning. “You did something,” she says. “Recently?”

“Look, I can go if that’s what you want.” Chapman starts to push to his feet.

“Stop.” She puts a hand on his arm. “Whatever I’m supposed to be angry about…” She blows her hair out of her face, bracing herself. “I had a traumatic brain injury, in late 1986. Most of my memories from before then are shot to hell. I can’t bring most of it to mind. What I can remember, I can’t make sense of. So if we’ve met before, I don’t remember.” It has the cadence of a prepared speech, one she’s had to make too many times.

“Oh.” Chapman sits back down. “Oh.”

“So we did know each other before, I’m guessing.” Loren settles in place as if getting ready to listen to a long story. “And then you… What? Stole my credit card? Slept with my boyfriend?”

“Put a yeerk in your brain.” He mumbles the words around a mouthful of shame hot enough to burn his tongue.

He knows what he did to her. Knows in a way that that smugly cynical 17-year-old never could have. He’s lived through it. He knows, actually _knows_ , what he did. At the time, Loren was younger than Melissa is now. And Chapman stood there and watched, smirking to himself, as they held her down and —

“Huh.” Loren laughs, jarring him. “Wouldn’t’ve guessed that one.” She puts a hand up to her own ear, seemingly more curious than horrified. “Me, a controller.”

“You’re taking this very well,” he says.

“I’ve never…” She laughs again. “All right, I guess I have experienced it. I’m sure it wasn’t fun, and I’m sure younger me was pissed at you. I’m just…” She drops her hand back to the dracon beam. “I’m not that girl, not anymore. However you hurt her, I don’t think it matters to me.”

“It’s,” he says. Swallows. “It’s worse than that. You were.” He swallows again. “You were the first human. That they ever had. After I… Gave you to them, that’s how they knew about Earth. They didn’t know English, and I didn’t know Galard. So it wasn’t until they were in your brain that they found out there are billions of humans, Class Five, on an undefended planet. They’re here right now because of me.”

Loren takes a sharp breath. Another. She sits with that, breathes, for another several seconds.

Chapman waits. Tries to unclench his jaw. Finds he’s lost the trick of it.

“Why?” she says at last.

A rusty half-laugh. “Believe it or not, Auntie Em, I just wanted to go home.”

“And giving the yeerks…”

_An entire planet’s worth of_ that.

“Giving them me, and humanity. Did it work?”

“No. Of course not.” His voice is flat. “If yeerks were in the habit of upholding their bargains, the Sharing wouldn’t exist.”

“Then why?”

Good question. He’d like an answer himself. “Because I thought I was smarter than you, and that you were too emotionally involved to see the truth. Because I was an arrogant little ass so busy pointing out everyone else’s contradictions I had no time to notice my own.”

“Can you just… tell it to me from the start?” Loren asks.

“It’s a long story.”

“We could just wait here in silence and try not to think about how we’re all gonna die, if you’d rather do that instead,” she offers.

It’s his turn to laugh. She hasn’t changed that much, Chapman thinks, no matter what she might say. “If you’d like. We met at a party. We were from different high schools, same town, but…” He sighs. “There’s really no part of this story that isn’t completely humiliating to relive.”

“I forgive you in advance for whatever it is.”

“You were a freshman, I was a senior. I knew, and I was hitting on you anyway. You went outside, probably to get away from me, and I followed you out there. It was my friend Geoffrey’s place, and he had this huge backyard. So we were almost a quarter mile away from anyone when the flying saucer decided to come down from the sky.”

“Yeerks?”

“Greys. You know, like from _Close Encounters of the Third Kind_?”

“No shit?”

“The andalites called them skrit na. You had names for all of them — Marvin, Twinkie, Mr. Roach, Tralfamadore.” He glances over at her. “I think it made you feel better about the fact that once they got their translator chips working, they refused to call us anything but Specimen 1 and Specimen 2. They insisted we were a breeding pair for their zoo.”

“Eeeeww. Nothing personal, but _ew_.”

“Yes. Like I said, you were fourteen,” he says. “We spent the next week eating mystery goo, peeing in a bucket, and bickering constantly. You were all about trying to break out at any opportunity. I kept trying to claim we should ‘play it smart’ and ‘be rational’ about the whole thing. Mostly to cover for the fact that I was far too scared to think about escape.”

“So they took us to their planet, put us in a zoo, and we’ve been living in a computer simulation ever since?” Loren suggests.

“I can’t actually prove that that’s not what happened.”

She shudders. “Forget I said it.”

“Then the ship we were on took a hit. Ripped the door right off our ‘enclosure.’ You got ahold of a shredder, took the captain hostage. I mostly stood around yelling suggestions until one of them cold clocked me. When I woke up, we were in the custody of a different batch of aliens.”

“Green, slimy, fondness for brains?”

“Blue. Arrogant. Eyes on stalks.”

“Ah,” Loren says. “The rescue party.” Yep, she really hasn’t changed.

Chapman tilts a hand in a so-so gesture. “They said they’d get us home in a few weeks. And then a few months. And then maybe someday. But we’d have nothing to worry about, because they were gonna erase our memories no matter what.”

“So you decided to go to their enemies for help instead. Got it.”

It sounds simple, when she says it like that.

“And then?” She tilts her head, still listening without looking. “How’d we get back?”

And then… The black hole. The _Jahar_ being eaten alive by asteroids, and then by space itself. Elfangor or someone had given him an oxygen mask, but Chapman’s still not sure that that was a kindness in a ship with no atmosphere. He remembers those final moments, clawing at his face with unbending fingers, unable to feel either point of contact with frostbite-necrotic flesh. The mask had let him live long enough to watch his body die in increments. He’d been black and rotting to the wrists by the time he finally lost consciousness.

Next thing he’d known, it’d been three seconds and also three years later. He’d been standing in the middle of a college campus, warm and oxygenated and thoroughly disoriented.

“And then you used the time machine, I presume,” he says now. “But to be honest, I have no idea.”

“Time… machine?” Her eyes have gone wide.

“It could change the past, allegedly. Alloran called it the most powerful weapon in the universe.” Chapman shrugs. “So you changed the past, somehow, so that none of it happened. But I remembered the way it had been. So did you. So did Elfangor.”

It’d felt inevitable, when a nearly-adult Loren had stopped him on the street a week after the end to ask him about yeerks. Checking her handiwork, Chapman had assumed. It hadn’t exactly been difficult to figure out the identity of the young man with soft grey eyes who’d stood twenty feet back, watching them both with inhuman intensity.

But that’s the thing about Loren. She assumes everyone’s always telling the truth. And Chapman’s always assumed everyone lies. Chapman lied to her then, told her he didn’t know what she was talking about. It’s only occurring to him now that she might have even been telling the truth, when she claimed at the time to be glad he wasn’t dead.

“I changed the past?” She doesn’t sound convinced. “I changed the _universe_?”

“You had a time machine.”

She presses a hand over her eyes. “In that case, I did a shit job of it.”

Chapman hmms. He can’t exactly disagree.

Still with a hand over her eyes, Loren sticks out a hand in front of her, curved in a half-circle.

“What’re you—?”

“Shhhhhh,” Loren says. “If we’re imagining this all from inside our alien zoo, might as well imagine myself a Dr. Pepper. Right… Now!” She opens her eyes, glaring at her empty hand.

Chapman laughs. “Worth a shot.”

“This zoo sucks,” Loren grumbles. “But my theory’s still more plausible than your stupid time machine thing.”

Having seen it with his own eyes, Chapman isn’t sure he disagrees. “It’s—”

A flash. Green light surges on the horizon. Silhouetted against the grey of the dawn, it’s sickening, unmistakable.

Three of the points of light are not stars, barely perceptible as too bright, too close. They’ve taken off, the tiny constellation hovering just off the ground. Another flash of green.

“What was that?” Loren says.

Chapman hesitates.

She twists around, grabbing him hard by the arm. “What was that?”

“Pool ship, if I’m not mistaken. Firing a dracon cannon.”

“No, no, _fuck_. It wasn’t supposed to…” Loren seems to realize that she’s still gripping his arm, hard enough to make his fingertips go numb. She releases him. Takes a few shaky breaths. “Tell me something else, yeah?”

“You liked softball,” Chapman says. “Hated your sister. Shortstop, I think, but you wanted to be a starting pitcher and they’d only let you do occasional relief. She was judgmental, lazy, tended to blame her problems on other people.” He tries to be subtle about shaking the feeling back into his hand. “Stop me if you know this already.”

“What am I doing?” She’s squinting in the direction of the battle. “I can morph, I could go out there and —”

“Leave the rest of us undefended?” Chapman thinks quickly, scrambling for tidbits. It was a long time ago. “You were more of a dog person, but didn’t mind cats. You hated English class. Didn’t like killing flies. You…” His voice softens. “You were brave. Brave enough to fight for us both and keep fighting until we got home. And compassionate. Incredibly understanding. Even when I was being an asshole or Alloran was treating us like vermin or Arbron was winding us up just because he could.”

Loren snorts. “Wonder what happened to _that_ Loren.”

“I admired the hell out of you, even though I twisted about in half trying to avoid admitting it to myself. Every time something went wrong, from the moment that tractor beam grabbed us to the end, I’d look at you first. I’d try and figure out what you were doing so I could do it myself.”

“Joke’s on you, pal.” Loren is still staring at the horizon. There’s another green flash, and she flinches again. “I can’t even raise a kid right, much less tell anyone else what to do.”

“Nobody can raise a kid right.” He’s survived enough PTA meetings to know that by now. “We can’t give them happiness, we can’t give them a good life. We can’t even give them what little we had.”

“What’d we ever have that was so great?”

“How about a childhood in a world where aliens were imaginary?”

Loren pushes both hands into her hair. “Fuck this.” She gestures angrily toward the faint lights of the Pool ship. “Fuck all of this. I abandoned him, you know that? My own kid. I let him go to that sister I don't even like, and now I’m sitting around watching him die.”

He doesn’t know how to comfort her. Has never had the knack for it. Can’t get over the habit of clutching himself close to himself, never letting vulnerability through.

“My wife went voluntarily,” he says awkwardly. His chosen strategy, as always, to make it about himself. “Alison, she… By then it wasn’t Alison anymore. But the thing she’d given her body to, it told me to join the Sharing. I didn’t know at first, but I’d seen enough that I figured it out midway through that first meeting. I walked out, and Iniss — the yeerk — told me that either I could join or Melissa could.”

At least now Loren is looking at him.

“Which is, I guess, why I’ve been letting a couple of child-neglecting aliens raise my daughter ever since,” he finishes. “I assume your sister’s not an alien. So there’s that.”

It’s Loren, as always, who makes the first move. Who bridges the gap, sliding over to sit with their arms pressed together. “I hate this.”

“I wish I could help.”

“Tell me something else?” she says.

“Maybe it’s all a simulation, like you said. Maybe we’re still dying inside that black hole, and —”

“Shhh. _That_ is no help.” She holds out an imaginary can to him. “Drink some Dr. Pepper. It’s zero-calorie. For that matter…” She picks up the dracon beam, handle first. “You be the one to shoot anything that gets too close. I can morph.”

“You sure about that?”

“Maybe I shouldn’t because of something I don’t remember. But this version of me? I trust you.”

He takes the dracon beam carefully, her skin warm against his own. “In that case, it’s nice to meet you.”

She smiles. “Loren Schaeffer.”

“Hedrick Chapman. It’s a pleasure.”

“ _Hedrick_?”

“Everyone calls me Chapman.”

“Even your mother?”

“She calls me ‘Dickie.’ And if you tell anyone, I’ll kill you in your sleep.”

“Why do I get the sense we’ve had this conversation before?”

He toasts her with his imaginary can, the skin of their arms sliding together. “It’s a brand-new reality, right? It is what you make of it.”

**Author's Note:**

> This story is cross-posted from [tumblr](https://thejakeformerlyknownasprince.tumblr.com/post/184973573744/we-could-pretend-but-that-never-suited-us).


End file.
